November 18, 2016

Sometimes it’s a positive balm to hold a piece of an animal dead and gone for 145 million years, or stare at a thousand vertical feet of sandstone, and know that we are all ants.

These lovelies here intrigue me deeply. They’re the three caudal vertebrae recovered from the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus that John Foster and I described a couple of years ago. Pretty sure I’ll have more to say about them in the future. For now it’s enough that they’ve come across such a vast gulf of time and given this stressed-out primate a little perspective.

May 17, 2016

UPDATE 19 May 2016

I belatedly realized that I caused some confusion in the original version of this post. This will hopefully sort things out:

The ventrolateral processes (1) are nothing new. As Ken Carpenter pointed out in a comment, Hatcher noted them back in 1901 in his monograph on Diplodocus carnegii. These are the features I describe below as being, “huge in Barosaurus, big in Diplodocus, small in Apatosaurus, and nonexistent in Haplocanthosaurus, Camarasaurus, and the brachiosaurids, at least from what I’ve seen.” To clarify: occasionally in camarasaurs and frequently in brachiosaurs you can trace a ridge along the ventrolateral margin of the centrum from the parapophysis to the cotyle. But these ridges are basically just the ‘corners’ of the centrum, leftover by the lateral and ventral waisting of the centrum – they do not project beyond the margin of the cotyle. In contrast, what I’ve been calling the ventrolateral flanges in diplodocids do project beyond the margins of the cotyle – they are additive structures, not just architectural leftovers. They also don’t vary much, other than to be more pronounced in more posterior cervicals.

The irregular ventral ridges (2) are a totally different thing. They’re on or near the sagittal midline of the centrum, usually restricted to the anteroposterior middle of the ventral centrum (so, about halfway between the condyle and the cotyle), and as my preferred term implies, highly variable among individuals and even among vertebrae in a series.

Hope that helps! (Original post starts below.)

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Back in 2005 I visited BYU while I was working on my dissertation. Back then I noted ventral ridges in a few diplodocine cervical vertebrae. (I hesitate to call such flimsy things ‘keels’.)

Up above is BYU 16918, a mid-to-posterior cervical vertebra of Diplodocus from the famous Dry Mesa Quarry. Here it is again in posterior view:

The things I have labeled VLF here are ventrolateral flanges, which are huge in Barosaurus, big in Diplodocus, small in Apatosaurus, and nonexistent in Haplocanthosaurus, Camarasaurus, and the brachiosaurids, at least from what I’ve seen. See this post for details. I know that the left VLF here looks like a second ridge, but the cotyle is broken off in such a way that we’re seeing the fossa just dorsal to the VLF margin. The ridge itself is skewed to the right, which could be natural or a result of taphonomy – as you can see from the photo at the top of the post, this vert has seen better days.

Here’s another Dry Mesa vert, BYU 11617, this time an anterior cervical of Barosaurus and in left lateral view:

Again in right lateral view – on this side you can see the fossa in the VLF more clearly:

And here’s the ventral view showing the ridge:

I noted these things in my notebook back when, filed them under, “Huh. How about that?” and went on with life.

Then last week Mike and I were at the North American Museum of Ancient Life in Lehi, Utah, and we saw this super-nice Barosaurus cervical on display in the prep lab (left ventro-lateral view). Check out the monster ventrolateral flanges, and the ridges between them at about mid-centrum.

Here’s another view, a more square-on ventral this time:

We owe a big thank you to Rick Hunter, who let us into the prep lab at the North American Museum of Ancient Life to see the Barosaurus material up close.

So what’s the deal with these ridges? I assume that they’re caused by pneumatic diverticula remodeling the ventral surface of the centrum. We know that such diverticula were down there because there are actual foramina on the ventral centrum in Supersaurus, many apatosaurines (Lovelace et al., 2008), many brachiosaurids, and probably loads of other things that haven’t been checked. Oddly enough, I’ve never seen the ridges in any of those other taxa. It seems that you get foramina or ridges, but not both. I have no idea what’s up with that – to paraphrase Neal Stephenson, Barosaurus cervicals are confections of air and marketing, and you’d think that if any sauropod would have straight-up foramina down there, it would be Barosaurus. But Barosaurus gets ridges and clunky old Apatosaurus gets foramina (sometimes, not all the time).

May 12, 2016

Things remain frantic on the Sauropocalypse tour. Today, we were back at the BYU Museum of Paleontology, working on four or five separate projects. Here’s Matt, photographing broken bone of the iconic Supersaurus cervical BYU 9024, while a pallet of Big Pink Apatosaur cervicals wait for attention in the background:

You’ve seen this bone before – I first posted on it 8 years ago this month, and it turned up again here and here. It is still the longest known vertebra of any animal that has ever lived.

And here’s Mike, getting Jensen’s sculpture of the same vertebra down from storage to compare it to the original:

In Jensen’s (1985) original description of this vertebra – which he at first referred to Ultrasauros – the only relevant illustration he included was one of the model, so it was good to see this bit of history in the flesh (Jensen did include photos of the actual bone in later papers). We’ll show the two vertebrae, real and sculpted, side by side in a future post.

References

Jensen, J. A. 1985. Three new sauropod dinosaurs from the Upper Jurassic of Colorado. Great Basin Naturalist 45, 697-709.

July 16, 2014

I was at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County yesterday to do some research in the ornithology collection. After lunch I was working on this pelican skeleton and I thought, “Geez, there is just no way to do this thing justice with still photos. I should make a video.” Here it is. You’ll want to see it full-screen–this being my first time out making a video, I didn’t realize that I was holding the phone the wrong way for efficient viewing on other devices.

The specimen is LACM Ornithology 86262. I’m posting this video with the knowledge and kind permission of the ornithology collection staff.

May 19, 2014

Now considered a junior synonym of Supersaurus, on very solid grounds.

Incidentally, unlike the neural spines of most non-titanosaurian sauropods, the neural spine of this vertebra is not simply a set of intersecting plates of bone. It is hollow and has a central chamber, presumably pneumatic. Evidence:

BUT after being subjected to the horror of the Yale Brontosaurus skull, I figured you all deserved a little awesome.

So here’s me getting one of 351 photos of the most posterior and largest of the Sauroposeidon jackets (this is not the awesome, BTW, just a stop along the way). This jacket holds what I once inferred to be the back half of C7 and all of C8. Now that Sauroposeidon may be a somphospondyl rather than a brachiosaur, who knows what verts these are–basal somphospondyls have up to 17 cervicals to brachiosaurids’ probable 13 (for a hypothetical view of an even-longer-necked Sauroposeidon, see this probably-prophetic post by Mike). The vertically-mounted skeleton in the background is Cotylorhynchus. Cotylorhynchus got a lot bigger than that–up to maybe 6 meters long and 2 or 3 tons–and was probably the largest land animal that had ever existed back in the Early Permian. Photo by OU grad student Andrew Thomas, whom you’ll be hearing about more here in the future.

I couldn’t crank the model myself on the road, thanks to the pathetic lack of processing power in my 6-year-old laptop (which will be replaced RSN). Andy Farke volunteered to do the photogrammetricizing with Agisoft Photoscan, if only I’d DropBox him the pictures. Here’s a screenshot from MeshLab showing the result:

If you’re curious, the meter stick at the top is actually one meter long, it just has the English measurement side showing. The giant caliper at the bottom is also marked off in inches, and it is open to 36.0 inches (it didn’t go to 1 meter, or I would have used that). You can tell that there is some perspective distortion involved here since 36 inches on the caliper is 1380 pixels, whereas the 39.4-inch meter stick is only 1341 pixels. Man, I hate scale bars. But they make good calibration targets.

Incidentally, after playing around with the model in orthographic mode in MeshLab, the distortions in the photos of the vertebrae themselves just scream at me. Finally, finally, I can escape the tyranny of perspective. Compare the ends of the big wooden beam at the top of the jacket to get a feel for how much the two views differ.

Working on Sauroposeidon again after all this time made me seriously nostalgic. I love that beast. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that those vertebrae are the most gorgeous physical objects in the universe. Also, an appropriately huge thank-you to preparator Kyle Davies (of apatosaur-sculpting fame), collections manager Jen Larsen, and Andrew Thomas again for help with wrassling those verts around, and for sharing their thoughts and advice. Thanks also to curators Rich Cifelli and Nick Czaplewski for their hospitality and for the go-ahead to undertake this work, and to Andy Farke for generating the model.

I’ll have a lot more to say about this stuff in the future. I didn’t go to all this work just for giggles. For a long time I’ve had a hankering to do a paper on the detailed anatomy of Sauroposeidon, based on all of the things that I’ve noticed in the last decade that didn’t make it into any of the early papers. And now there’s the proposed synonymy of Paluxysaurus with Sauroposeidon. And “Angloposeidon” needs some attention–Darren and I have been thinking about writing “Angloposeidon II” for years now. And…well, plenty more.

So, loads more to come, but not for the next few weeks. Eventually I’ll be publishing all of this–the photos, the 3D models, the whole works. Stay tuned.

UPDATE a few days later

Man, I am frazzled, because I forgot to include the moral of the story: if I can do this, you can do this. There are good, free photogrammetry programs out there–Peter Falkingham published a whole paper on free photogrammetry in 2012, and posted a guide to an even better program, VisualSFM, on Academia.edu. Even Agisoft Photoscan is not prohibitively expensive–under $200 for an educational license. MeshLab is free and has hordes of good free tutorials. For the photography itself, you basically just build a virtual dome of photos around an object. If you need more instructions than that, Heinrich has written a whole series of tutorials. It doesn’t take a fancy camera–I used a point-and-shoot for the Sauroposeidon work shown here (a Canon S100 operating at 6 megapixels, if anyone is curious). What are you waiting for?